80s landscapes and Computers vs Human work

[novoline]

Hello Everyone,
I'm new here; I'm doing some research for my work and am finding it very difficult to find sources for the topic I'm interested in. I'm hoping posting here can generate some suggestions.

I'm interested in finding fiction, novels preferably, that are set in the latter half of the 1980's, dealing with computers, automated systems, and networks taking over or improving on the human tasks. I don't necessarily mean as a central theme, only that the topic is dealt with in some way. I'm not talking about a sort of prediction of what the late 80s will be like, but rather a concurrent reflection or later re-examination of the era through fiction.
A good example would be David Foster Wallace's The Pale King: older technology (reel-to-reel mainframes, punchcard systems) that served the bureaucracy and the prospect of newer machines that can virtually replace entire departments of the IRS.
Any suggestions are welcome, and thanks, all the best

n

[PeterL]

Specifying that it be from the later 1980's makes it hard, because that isn't a popular sub-genre. Computers or robots have been taking over for decades. You might want to see what works from any year. The Humanoid series by Jack Williamson was about robots taking over, but it is from the 11940's and 1950's.

[billl]

From a bit after the period you're talking about, there's Douglas Coupland's "microserfs" which is about computer programmers before Windows XP. It's late 90's, but I guess it is on the wrong side of the change you're interested in--and certainly well beyond punch-cards... Really, even in the early 80's, punch-cards were pretty old stuff--if the IRS still used them in the late 80's it would've been because of problems transitioning.

I do have a couple minor examples, if that'll be helpful, from a mystery writer named Len Deighton. It's maybe a bit random, but I've been reading through this genre recently.

1) "Spy Story" (1972) a novel that includes a lot about a British intelligence unit that specializes in simulating war-games (it's not the main plot, but the protagonist is involved in this department, and the main plot passes through I guess, or something like that). The military practices various scenarios in the North Atlantic, with computers calculating outcomes. People are in separate room, certain staff are sitting at a computer terminal in the room, the guy running the thing sort of explains how it works, higher-ups maybe aren't convinced of its utility, etc. Just a few mentions of the hardware involved, but the process and practice of these simulations get a decent amount of attention in the narrative.

2) "Berlin Game" (1983) there's a scene in this one where the protagonist goes down to the basement where the data is kept for the intelligence services, and Deighton takes time to describe the atmosphere of the room and experience of logging on and typing a bit on a terminal, and getting a printout of info about a particular person. It's just a scene, but it's presented as a pretty modern thing, a new element of spycraft, etc.

[novoline]

Specifying that it be from the later 1980's makes it hard, because that isn't a popular sub-genre. Computers or robots have been taking over for decades. You might want to see what works from any year. The Humanoid series by Jack Williamson was about robots taking over, but it is from the 11940's and 1950's.

Not necessarily sub-genre, more of a setting is what I mean.

I'm not talking really about ROBOTS TAKING OVER stories, more so the cultural climate that existed. The phenomenon we had in the 1980s of faster and cheaper computers being mainstreamed into limitless areas of use. The 80s specifically had that perfect mix of the Cold War, the rise of Personal Computers, and Reagan's recession then economic boom, among other things. These conditions then led to computers doing many tasks (i.e. jobs) that humans did.
I'm interested in finding books that talk about and preferably examine the relationships between the attitudes at the time (re:efficiency, progress, consumerism), what was going on culturally (music, politics, art, film), and the new digital culture that was developing and wouldn't network until the 1990's.